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Cultural Unity and Diversity in Brazil
Cultural Unity and Diversity
Brazilian culture was never monolithic. Since the sixteenth century,
it has been an amalgamation of traditional Iberian, indigenous,
and African values, as well as more recent Western values, developed
in northern Europe and the United States, such as equality, democracy,
efficiency, and individual rights. At times there are subtle or
open conflicts, especially between norms of Mediterranean and Anglo-Saxon
origin, or between practices of European versus Amerindian or African
origin. However, Brazil is remarkable for the way in which there
is unity in cultural diversity. Sometimes the values and practices
of different origins have blended with each other, as in the case
of Afro-Brazilian religious syncretism or liberation theology (see
Glossary).
Another way of reconciling diversity has been the often considerable
distance between actual practices, which conform with tradition,
and official norms, which generally follow the positivist (positivism--see
Glossary) logic of "order and progress" that underlay
the establishment of the republic in 1889. The difference between
norms and behavior, or between theory and practice, is a constant
throughout Brazilian history. In colonial times and during the empire,
imported cultural values and social norms had to be reconciled with
the extenuating circumstances and realities of a frontier situation.
Getting married officially, for example, was difficult in the absence
of priests or because of the high cost of service by the justices
of the peace.
In the 1990s, many people ignore laws that are not enforced, or
allege that doing the right thing would be fine but that they lack
the condições (conditions). The aphorism that sums
up a common attitude about doing one's duty is, "Ninguém
é de ferro " (No one is made of iron). The relaxed attitude
is reinforced by the fact that laws or norms are often seen as having
been imposed from the outside, rather than being the result of a
social contract established for the common good. Thus, Brazilians,
who are known for pragmatism, have become adept at living with idealistic
rules, on the one hand, and actual practices that are often quite
divergent, on the other. They switch easily between different cultural
codes ranging from "traditional" values, such as machismo
and paternalism, to "modern" values and social norms that
favor women and equality.
Data as of April 1997
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